John Michael Greer recently posted a short story, “Christmas Eve 2050,” noting, “the tools of narrative fiction have enormous value for putting facts in context.” I agree; that’s part of the reason we’ve been working on the Fifth World, and I think that Greer’s story is spot-on as a description of one segment of the population. It’s in a similar vein as Carolyn Baker’s “Journal from the Future: Middle-America, 2020 A.D., A Story That Could Come True.” I’d like to offer a story of my own, about a very different part of the population in that same world….

Of the seventh generation video game consoles, Nintendo’s Wii has some of the shoddiest hardware, a position Nintendo is used to after the showing the GameCube gave in the sixth generation. That isn’t the arena Nintendo’s competing in; no, the Wii is competing in design and philosophy. But what the Wii has going for it most of all might be as simple as the controller.

Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” has enjoyed tremendous commercial success and a rabid following. The format of Millan’s show puts him into homes with “troubled” dogs, and chronicles Millan’s attempts to end the disruptive behavior. Millan fancies himself a “dog psychologist,” but his model of dog psychology is grounded firmly in the notion that dogs have the same psychology as their wild lupine ancestors—and that means a life preoccupied with dominance behavior, power displays, and the quest to become the “alpha.” We’ve recently been exploring the relationship between canids and hominids—how humans and canines closely co-evolved, and in particular, how the cooperative, egalitarian human band and tribe was something we learned from the pack structure of wolves. Doesn’t the rigid hierarchy of wolf packs suggest that dominance, too, must be a normal part of human society? Aren’t wolf packs—and, if human society is patterned on the wolf pack, our own societies, too—rigid dominance hierarchies?

Given the special bond humans and canids share, it seems only natural that I turn to the specific role that they’ve played in my home. What emerges is an amazing testimony to the power of the spirit of that place. Like everything else there, it is fundamentally a story about a primeval ecology that was destroyed, and a new ecology emerging in the same place—something new, something different, but something unmistakably related to its ancestor. If there’s a single line that could sum up the story of that place, found like fractals in the story of every community nested in that place, it might be that phrase so often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

A lot of the regular readers here are also regular readers of Ran Prieur, so many of you may already have seen this, but for the benefit of those who haven’t, I’d like to quote what Ran wrote today, because it’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever read on his blog. I know I don’t usually indulge in simple quotation like this, but this is one of those exceptional times when something so important is stated so well that there’s nothing more I can add to it, except try to put it in front of a few more eyeballs.

The Hobbesian myth that life “in the state of nature” is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short” is one that simply cannot stand in the face of anthropological evidence. As we have seen again and again, while wild humans certainly do not live in the perfect, idealistic utopias of Rousseauian fantasy, their ways of life do enjoy the benefit of being the pattern of life to which two million years of evolution have adapted the human animal. A rational person would positively expect their quality of life to be much improved over civilization’s.^{1, 2} But of course, it is not an ideal utopia, either. We might best explore this topic by learning from an animal that we’re especially close to, one that has shaped us and molded us into who we are: Canis lupus, the gray wolf.

Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, or so the story goes, began with a vision in 312, prior to the Battle of Milan Bridge. Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sun, and heard the words, “in hoc signo vinces” (”in this sign, conquer”). After painting his soldiers’ shields with chi-rhos, Constantine won the battle against Maxentius and became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire. What is less well known is just how popular Constantien was with various sun gods—his first encounter was with Apollo, and later, Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun, an aspect of Mithras.¹ Of course, sun worship is as ancient as it is universal, and certainly well-placed: the sun is the ultimate source of energy for all life on earth. However many steps removed we might be,² we all live on solar energy by other means.